Complexity (Finding & Making Space in Wild Color)

This course will explore collage and assemblage through a range of “attachment” methods and materials, including glue and nails but also metaphors, like how babies form attachment and how adults continue to love, connect and make sense of their lives. Through writing, drawing, and building small layered spaces with images, objects, scraps of wood, paint and found materials from the surrounding woods and thrift stores, students will devise structures for understanding the complexity of experiences in the world and virtual spaces. Using layers, lenses, frames, architectural models, psychological projection, “flow”, data, statistics, information processing, primate visions, “Ways of Knowing”, poetics, politics, media studies, and détournement, the goal of this class will be to disorganize, to be messy and intuitive, and to saturate our senses with the complexities of physical space. Students will read Francois Cheng on Chinese painting, Leo Steinberg on the flatbed picture plane, Hito Steyerl on vertigo, Lauren Berlant on attachment, The Devil in the White City for its description of psychological architecture, and will look underwater, in our purses and coat pockets, into geological strata and nurse logs, tide-pools and bird cages, cosmic models and snail shells to think about “space as the place,” as Sun Ra said. And we will do it all in color.

Faculty

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung was born in 1975 in Los Gatos, CA, grew up in Olympia, WA, received her MFA in 2007 from SAIC, and recently relocated to Shelton CT, where she lives and works. She is a member of the Painting faculty at Yale School of Art. She Her work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Painter, Painter at the Walker Art Center, (Minneapolis, MN); The Program at ReMap4 (Athens, Greece); Michelle Grabner: I Work From Home at MOCA Cleveland (Cleveland, OH); Shakti at Brand New Gallery (Milan, Italy); and a solo exhibition, Chlorophyll Bluess at Diana Lowenstein (Miami, FL). Recent exhibitions include a 2016 solo show in Detroit's Michael Jon and Alan Gallery, the 2014 Whitney Biennial and Violet Fogs Azure Snot at Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago, IL). She wrote (the 95 theses on painting) in 2010.